Friday, 21 November 2014

Knowing the Beats Per Minute (BPM) of a song can be very useful

If you are a runner matching the BPM to your running pace can help improve your performance.

Professional DJ's need to be able to blend the end of one song into the
next, without the transition being awkward or jerky. By figuring out the BPM you'll
know if you need to bring the tempo up or down to have them both playing
at the same speed.

Creating a playlist to fit a certain mood is considerably easier if you use songs with a similar BPM

You'll notice it doesn't just provide the BPM but all kind of cool things such as key, danceability and mood , but more about these in another post.

The future

This is a brand new project so it is not integrated into any other tools yet but soon SongKong and Jaikoz will allow you to both submit new AcousticBrainz data and to automatically add it to your songs.

Sunday, 16 November 2014

The SongKong 3.4 release is full of improvements to the matching process.

SongKong now does a much better job of handling multiple albums without metadata in one single folder. Previously if you had Only allow match if all tracks in album were matched enabled it had difficulty matching multiple albums contained within a single folder unless they had some existing metadata. The workaround was to disable the option but this then allowed SongKong to match partial albums, possibly not the desired outcome. Now in this release SongKong can derive metadata from the songs Acoustids and group and match the songs accordingly without having to disable the above option.

Overall SongKong is better at matching albums, before this release it would try and match a grouping completely to one album, if that failed and depending on user preferences it would then match each song one by one. Now before resorting to song by song matching it trys matches partial groups to a release. This means results are split over less albums, and it speeds up the matching process because it is quicker to match a group of songs to a release in one go rather than song by song.

There are some super larger releases in MusicBrainz and Discogs, these are usually Box Sets of the complete works of established artists. Matching songs to these larger releases can be time consuming and give the impression that SongKong has stopped working. A number of improvements have been made to prevent SongKong spending too much processing a group of songs, and a Still Alive progress bar has been added to show that SongKong is still working

Match Song to Recording only is now more effective at identifying the correct song when an acoustid matches to multiple recordings because it takes existing metadata into account.

Discogs matching is more effective because SongKong can now find matching albums based on the existing song titles in your files, before potential albums were only found based on existing artist and album name metadata.

We have also improved the identifying of duplicates when matching songs by taking into account acoustids and song title metadata at the same time. By identifying duplicates files we can better match the non-duplicates files to the correct album.
Full details of all issues fixed in this release can be found
here
.